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On Breaking Bad and Jedi Cookies

Well. It’s been over three days since The Shipping arrived, but we’re still negotiating around piles of boxes and stuff. However, there’s a reason for our lack of significant progress in unpacking and organizing. We have no self-control. In the last few weeks, Breaking Bad has happened to our lives; once we started it, we quickly realized that it’s as addictive as the drugs it’s about. The more we watched, the harder it became to stop watching. We finally caught ourselves up, and then this morning we hopped online as soon as we woke up (I admit this to you with no shame whatsoever) to see if we could access last night’s episode. We could! So that was the first thing we did today – we watched Breaking Bad while drinking our coffee, surrounded by the mayhem of boxes.

It’s a fine way to start any day, as far as I’m concerned.

In the last year, several television series have taken us delightfully hostage with their excellence: American Horror Story, The Following (brought to my attention by one of you awesome readers), House of Cards, Homeland, Damages and Game of Thrones. Stunning works of art, all. Cute fluff such as Hart of Dixie mildly amused and entertained us. We discovered Arrested Development and greatly enjoyed it… up until the newly released episodes of this year, which did not inspire hilarity the way the prior seasons did. (We felt that the momentum had been lost, and the revised strategy behind it somehow resulted in awkward and left the jokes sitting outside, where they went stale.) And somewhere along the way, we found ourselves inexplicably sucked into Pretty Little Liars, which made no sense at all on any level, but it provided a steady stream of light and cheesy entertainment for quite a while. Purpose served! We’re not above it.

But Breaking Bad? Genius! 99.9% Pure genius. Everything about it astonishes… the writing, the acting, the direction. The character development, and the story, itself, it’s all just phenomenal. It lives up to the hype better than anything I’ve ever seen. We’re glad that we waited so long to start watching it, because starting it when we did brought us seamlessly up to the Final Season now airing. Our timing was perfect, albeit at the expense of making a swift job of the unpacking and organizing around here.

So that’s our status today. Surrounded by stuff, but current with Breaking Bad and waiting impatiently for next week’s episode, along with the show’s hundreds of thousands of other addicts.

On another note, the kitchen being buried in boxes precluded cooking for a few days, so on Saturday night we called in for Thai food from a mixed Asian cuisine place. I found fortune cookies at the bottom of the bag, which excited me. I never eat them, but I open them, anyway, because I enjoy reading the fortunes. The superstition is a remnant of my childhood. I like to believe in these things.

The problem is that in the last ten years or so, fortune cookie “fortunes” have become platitudes more and more, rather than predictions. “Everything happens for a reason.” “This, too, shall pass.” Like that. Still, I feel a hopeful thrill when I see a fortune cookie. Maybe this time it’ll be an actual fortune! I always think.

I brought the two cookies to Callaghan, opened one, and read: “May the good spirits be with you always.”

“That’s not a fortune cookie. That’s a Jedi cookie,” Callaghan said indignantly.

Fortune from the Jedi cookie.

Hmm… better to think of it as a Jedi cookie than as a non-fortune, right? That eases the disappointment somewhat! A Jedi cookie. I like that.